The Exploits of Plouj

Since I’m doing quite a bit of Java programming lately I’ve become curious about the state of writing concurrent code in it. I was fortunate enough to have a colleague let me borrow the following book:

Having gone through more than half of it already I’m rather surprised as to just how many different tools are available for solving concurrent problems and just how many are a instantly available to Java programmers. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, none of these tools in and of themselves are adequate enough for avoiding deadlocks and writing composable deadlock free code. My next step in the search for that silver bullet is to try writing something interesting in Clojure or Haskell using STM.

Well, after about 3 months of almost full-time job searching I’ve finally gotten a new permanent job. Today is my first day as a Developer at OANDA.

In April I was privileged to be one of the 1125 students who got selected for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2008 program. I was accepted to work on a project to implement Panorama Viewing in VLC. This summer was my last chance to participate in GSoC as a student because of my graduation date so I was very excited to have this once in a lifetime opportunity. More recently, I received an offer for a full-time “Linux Application and OS Developer” position at SOMA Networks – a company in downtown Toronto. Given the importance of a permanent job and having read the advice from previous GSoC participants, it didn’t take me long to decide to cancel the GSoC project and focus on the new job. Due to timing, however, I still managed to receive an acceptance gift from Google. The gift is a book called Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think. Apart from being an interesting read, it’s a nice souvenir to keep in memory of the many hours I spent preparing for GSoC by choosing a project to apply for and writing multiple proposals.